Accepted Answer

In my case it's power when idle over heat. I get that a lot of people love the platform for the features, but the idea of spending hours programming scripts to downclock a PC to minimize it's use by constantly running checks to see how much it's being used seems counterintuitive. It's not really an issue with ClearOS, I imagine it's an upstream issue since people have been discussing it since 2014 or earlier on here.

I'll try this for a bit... but it's very likely I'm going to go in another direction.

Both the paid and free offerings of ClearOS, while great in some aspects - have a few things the leave me considering going back to my old solution (XG/UTM) or setting up snort and a few things in a different route. While I lot of focus is placed on the features, there seems to be a few things like power savings, network card interface strangeness (you can delete an interface and then have to spend time trying to figure out how to add it back) has left me feeling this is a product that's highly targeting the paid versions and people who are less concerned about actual power usage... I just don't need as many features, I just need a gateway, firewall, virus scanning and IPS. This does a whole heck of a lot more, but - I don't need it.

Accepted Answer

While don't have an i5 running ClearOS 7.3 here - had no trouble controlling the frequency and hence cput power/temperature on an AMD running ClearOS 7.3 and an i3 running Fedora at a level equivalent to ClearOS 7.3. The reason for doing this? My office is not air-conditioned and summer temperatures here in Australia get pretty high :-) All the ClearOS systems here run BOINC assisting with medical research using their spare cycles and run almost continually at 100% cpu utilization. Hence the requirement in summer to reduce the frequency, and hence power, to keep the temperatures 'safe'. The medical research? see https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

Probably more than you wanted to know - but documented most of what was done...

A lot of the detail is how to automatically adjust cpu frequency. If you want to 'down-clock' permanently - then a simple script that runs every time the machine boots is all that would be necessary...

Accepted Answer

From my playing around, all the speed governing drivers should be loaded automatically. I believe there are utilities such as cpupower for playing around with the newer p-state drivers, but I don't think you get much control. There is another program as well, but I can't remember its name.

In 6.x I used to run the command on boot "cpupower frequency-set --governor conservative" but I don't bother any more. I could not convince myself it did anything.